The constant connections and disconnections of a mobile device to services and entities within a telecommunication and/or data network increase the amount of signaling network traffic within that network, which lowers the performance of the network overall. This imposes a burden upon network operators that forces them to increase bandwidth and network access. To date, carriers have been able to invest in 4G and LTE networks to boost network capacity in hotspots. However, these solutions are reaching their limit. LTE and 4G are also showing that the perceived capacity of added bandwidth is causing users and applications to increase usage and data consumption. In the long run, it might add to the congestion problem rather than help.
Furthermore, in most cases, a mobile device may be receiving data from multiple sources (e.g., servers, web-sites, nodes of a network, etc.) in the service network. The router/communication network between the services and the client ensures that all services can communicate changes to the client over a single physical connection. However, a problem that may occur is that different services (without knowing of each other's actions) trigger the client to create that connection at different times, and there may be a lack of an efficient or optimal alignment of data transfer from the services to the client. Hence efficient utilization of the shared connection is lacking (or at least minimal or sub-optimal) and at times the single connection may in reality only provide an adequate or a realistic level of service for a single service or source of data.
While mobile or broadband networks may be designed for high-throughput of large amounts of data, they were not necessarily tailored to service the mobile applications that require frequent, low-throughput requests of small amounts of data. Existing networks also do not take into account different types of mobile traffic and priorities of the different types of traffic, for example, from a user experience perspective.
Such transactions put the mobile device radio in a high-power mode for a considerable length of time—typically between 15-30 seconds. As the high-power mode can consume as much as 100× the power as an idle mode, these network-initiated applications are power hungry and can quickly drain the battery. The issue has been exacerbated by the rapid increase of the popularity of applications with network-initiated functionalities, such as push email, news feeds, status updates, multimedia content sharing and other mobile applications, etc. Furthermore, the problem with constant polling is that mobile phones also rely on signaling to send and receive calls and SMS messages and sometimes these basic mobile functions are forced to take a backseat to unruly applications and other mobile clients.
Therefore, in light of these disadvantages associated with conventional interactions between applications residing on a mobile device and the network entities with which the mobile device and its applications may interact, there is a need for a more intelligent approach to this kind of traffic. More specifically, there is a need for methods and systems for providing APIs and API extensions to third party applications for optimizing and minimizing application traffic.